Angels Flight Read online

  Praise for Michael Connelly

  ‘His methods of killing and eluding detection are infernally ingenious, adding an intellectual charge to the visceral kick of the hunt’

  New York Times

  ‘Connelly is a crime-writing genius. His Harry Bosch stories are genuine modern classics ... Unmissable’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘Connelly has great skills. One is the creation of characters who live and breathe, so that we care about them far more than we do for the cardboard figures stamped out by most thriller writers. His second skill is mastery of pace. His books are page-turners, and the author is in sublime control of the speed at which we turn those pages’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘While the themes of Connelly’s LA crime novels are familiar (power, envy, corruption), his plotting is anything but’

  Esquire

  ‘A superb legal thriller that manages three final twists ... The first line of The Brass Verdict is “everybody lies”, so there are plenty of surprises. And, of course, as a writer of fiction, Connelly proves to be a brilliant liar’

  Evening Standard

  ‘A clever plot, full of twists, to make a first-rate legal thriller’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Intensely clever, entirely credible ... thrilling, suspenseful and securely anchored in procedure and purpose. Not a false note; deeply satisfying stuff’

  Literary Review

  ’No one writes a better modern thriller than Connelly. Guaranteed to keep you riveted until the very last page’

  Time Out

  ‘The best writer of tough detective fiction at the moment is Michael Connelly ... For those who like a bit of contrariness and astringency in their heroes, Bosch has to come head of the list’

  Irish Times

  Angels Flight

  MICHAEL CONNELLY

  www.michaelconnelly.com.au

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CONNELLY

  Fiction

  The Black Echo

  The Black Ice

  The Concrete Blonde

  The Last Coyote

  The Poet

  Trunk Music

  Blood Work

  Angels Flight

  Void Moon

  A Darkness More than Night

  City of Bones

  Chasing the Dime

  Lost Light

  The Narrows

  The Closers

  The Lincoln Lawyer

  Echo Park

  The Overlook

  The Brass Verdict

  The Scarecrow

  Nine Dragons

  The Reversal

  Fifth Witness

  The Drop

  Nonfiction

  Crime Beat

  This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2009.

  This edition first published in the United States in 1999 by Orion Books, a division of Orion Publishing Group

  Copyright © Hieronymous, Inc 1999

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 74269 8106

  A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly is the author of more than a dozen acclaimed Harry Bosch thrillers and several courtroom dramas featuring Mickey Haller, as well as stand-alone bestsellers such as The Poet. Michael Connelly is a former President of the Mystery Writers of America. His novels have won an Edgar Award, the Nero Wolfe prize and the Anthony Award. He lives with his family in Tampa, Florida. Visit his website at www.michaelconnelly.com.au

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Michael Connelly

  Title Page

  Also by Michael Connelly

  Copyright Page

  Author biography

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Teaser chapter

  This is for

  McCaleb Jane Connelly

  1

  The word sounded alien in his mouth, as if spoken by someone else. There was an urgency in his own voice that Bosch didn’t recognize. The simple hello he had whispered into the telephone was full of hope, almost desperation. But the voice that came back to him was not the one he needed to hear.

  ‘Detective Bosch?’

  For a moment Bosch felt foolish. He wondered if the caller had recognized the faltering of his voice.

  ‘This is Lieutenant Michael Tulin. Is this Bosch?’

  The name meant nothing to Bosch and his momentary concern about how he sounded was ripped away as an awful dread entered his mind.

  ‘This is Bosch. What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Hold please for Deputy Chief Irving.’

  ‘What is — ’

  The caller clicked off and there was only silence. Bosch now remembered who Tulin was — Irving’s adjutant. Bosch stood still and waited. He looked around the kitchen; only the dim oven light was on. With one hand he held the phone hard against his ear, the other he instinctively brought up to his stomach, where fear and dread were twisting together. He looked at the glowing numbers on the stove clock. It was almost two, five minutes past the last time he had looked at it. This isn’t right, he thought as he waited. They don’t do this by phone. They come to your door. They tell you this face-to-face.

  Finally, Irving picked up on the other end of the line.

  ‘Detective Bosch?’

  ‘Where is she? What happened?’

  Another moment of excruciating silence went by as Bosch waited. His eyes were closed now.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Just tell me, what happened to her? I mean ... is she alive?’

  ‘Detective, I’m not sure what it is you are talking about. I’m calling because I need to muster your team as soon as
possible. I need you for a special assignment.’

  Bosch opened his eyes. He looked through the kitchen window into the dark canyon below his house. His eyes followed the slope of the hill down toward the freeway and then up again to the slash of Hollywood lights he could see through the cut of the Cahuenga Pass. He wondered if each light meant someone awake and waiting for someone who wasn’t going to come. Bosch saw his own reflection in the window. He looked weary. He could make out the deep circles etched beneath his eyes, even in the dark glass.

  ‘I have an assignment, Detective,’ Irving repeated impatiently. ‘Are you able to work or are you — ’

  ‘I can work. I just was mixed up there for a moment.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry if I woke you. But you should be used to it.’

  ‘Yes. It’s no problem.’

  Bosch didn’t tell him that he hadn’t been awakened by the call. That he had been roaming around in his dark house waiting.

  ‘Then get it going, Detective. We’ll have coffee down here at the scene.’

  ‘What scene?’

  ‘We’ll talk about it when you get here. I don’t want to delay this any further. Call your team. Have them come to Grand Street between Third and Fourth. The top of Angels Flight. Do you know where I’m talking about?’

  ‘Bunker Hill? I don’t — ’

  ‘It will be explained when you get here. Seek me out when you are here. If I am at the bottom come down to me before you speak with anyone.’

  ‘What about Lieutenant Billets? She should — ’

  ‘She will be informed about what is happening. We’re wasting time. This is not a request. It is a command. Get your people together and get down here. Am I making myself clear to you?’

  ‘You’re clear.’

  ‘Then I will be expecting you.’

  Irving hung up without waiting for a reply. Bosch stood with the phone still at his ear for a few moments, wondering what was going on. Angels Flight was the short inclined railroad that carried people up Bunker Hill in downtown — far outside the boundaries of the Hollywood Division homicide table. If Irving had a body down there at Angels Flight the investigation would fall under the jurisdiction of Central Division. If Central detectives couldn’t handle it because of case-load or personnel problems, or if the case was deemed too important or media sensitive for them, then it would be bumped to the bulls, the Robbery-Homicide Division. The fact that a deputy chief of police was involved in the case before dawn on a Saturday suggested the latter possibility. The fact that he was calling Bosch and his team in instead of the RHD bulls was the puzzle. Whatever it was that Irving had working at Angels Flight didn’t make sense.

  Bosch glanced once more down into the dark canyon, pulled the phone away from his ear and clicked it off. He wished he had a cigarette but he had made it this far through the night without one. He wouldn’t break now.

  He turned his back and leaned on the counter. He looked down at the phone in his hand, turned it back on and hit the speed dial button that would connect him with Kizmin Rider’s apartment. He would call Jerry Edgar after he talked to her. Bosch felt a sense of relief come over him that he was reluctant to acknowledge.

  He might not yet know what awaited him at Angels Flight, but it would certainly take his thoughts away from Eleanor Wish.

  Rider’s alert voice answered after two rings.

  ‘Kiz, it’s Harry,’ he said. ‘We’ve got work.’

  2

  Bosch agreed to meet his two partners at the Hollywood Division station to pick up cars before they headed downtown to Angels Flight. On the way down the hill to the station he had punched in KFWB on his Jeep’s radio and picked up a breaking news report on a homicide investigation under way at the site of the historical inclined railroad. The newsman on the scene reported that two bodies had been found inside one of the train cars and that several members of the Robbery-Homicide squad were on the scene. But that was the extent of the reporter’s information, as he also noted that the police had placed an unusually wide cordon of yellow tape around the crime scene, prohibiting him from getting a closer look. At the station Bosch communicated this thin bit of information to Edgar and Rider while they signed three slickbacks out of the motor pool.

  ‘So it looks like we’re gonna be playing sloppy seconds to RHD,’ Edgar concluded, showing his annoyance at being rousted from sleep to spend probably the whole weekend doing gofer work for the RHD bulls. ‘Our guts, their glory. And we aren’t even on call this weekend. Why didn’t Irving call out Rice’s got-damned team if he needed a Hollywood team?’

  Edgar had a point. Team One — Bosch, Edgar and Rider — wasn’t even up on call rotation this weekend. If Irving had followed proper call-out procedure he would have called Terry Rice, who headed up Team Three, which was currently on top of the rotation. But Bosch had already figured that Irving wasn’t following any procedures, not if the deputy chief had called him directly before checking with his supervisor, Lieutenant Grace Billets.

  ‘Well, Jerry,’ Bosch said, more than used to his partner’s whining, ‘you’ll get the chance to ask the deputy chief personally in a little while.’

  ‘Yeah, right, I do that and I’ll find my ass down in Harbor the next ten years. Fuck that.’

  ‘Hey, Harbor Division’s an easy gig,’ Rider said, just to rag Edgar a bit. She knew Edgar lived in the Valley and that a transfer to Harbor Division would mean a miserable ninety-minute commute each way — the pure definition of freeway therapy, the brass’s method of unofficially punishing malcontents and problem cops. ‘They only pull six, seven homicides a year down there.’

  ‘That’s nice but count me the fuck out.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Bosch said. ‘Let’s just get going and we’ll worry about all of that stuff later. Don’t get lost.’

  Bosch took Hollywood Boulevard to the 101 and coasted down the freeway in minimal traffic to downtown. Halfway there he checked the mirror and saw his partners cruising in the lanes behind him. Even in the dark and with other traffic he could pick them out. He hated the new detective cars. They were painted black and white and looked exactly like patrol cruisers with the exception that they did not carry emergency lights across the roof. It had been the former chiefs idea to replace unmarked detective cars with the so-called slickbacks. The whole thing had been a scam perpetrated to fulfill his promises to put more cops on the street. By changing unmarked cars into clearly marked cars, he was giving the public the erroneous impression that there were more cops patrolling the streets. He also counted the detectives using slickbacks when he addressed community groups and proudly reported that he had increased the number of cops on the street by hundreds.

  Meantime, detectives trying to do their jobs drove around like targets. More than once Bosch and his team had sought to serve an arrest warrant or had attempted to come into a neighborhood quietly in the course of an investigation only to have their presence signaled by their own cars. It was stupid and dangerous but it was the chiefs edict and it was carried out throughout the department’s divisional detective bureaus, even after the chief was not asked back for a second five-year term. Bosch, like many of the department’s detectives, hoped the new chief would soon order the detective cars back to normal. Meanwhile, he no longer drove the car assigned to him home from work. It had been a nice detective supervisor’s perk having a take-home car but he didn’t want the marked car sitting in front of his house. Not in L.A. You never knew what menace that could bring to your door.

  They got to Grand Street by two forty-five. As Bosch pulled to a stop he saw an unusually large number of police-related vehicles parked along the curb at California Plaza. He noted the crime scene and coroner’s vans, several patrol cars and several more detective sedans — not the slickbacks, but the unmarked cars still used by the RHD bulls. While he waited for Rider and Edgar to pull up he opened his briefcase, took out the cellular phone and called his home. After five rings the machine picked up the call and he heard his own voi
ce telling him to leave a message. He was about to click off but decided to leave a message.

  ‘Eleanor, it’s me. I’ve got a call out ... but page me or call me on the cell phone when you get in so I know you’re okay ... Um, okay, that’s it. Bye — oh, it’s about two forty-five right now. Saturday morning. Bye.’

  Edgar and Rider had walked up to his door. He put the phone away and got out with his briefcase. Edgar, the tallest, held up the yellow crime scene tape and they crossed under, gave their names and badge numbers to a uniform officer with the crime scene attendance list, and then walked across California Plaza.

  The plaza was the centerpiece of Bunker Hill, a stone courtyard formed by the conjoining of two marble office towers, a high-rise apartment building and the Museum of Modem Art. There was a huge fountain and reflecting pool at its center, though the pumps and lights were off at this hour, leaving the water still and black.

  Past the fountain was the beaux arts revival-styled station and wheelhouse at the top of Angels Flight. It was next to this small structure that most of the investigators and patrol officers milled about as if waiting for something. Bosch looked for the gleaming shaven skull that belonged to Deputy Chief Irvin Irving but didn’t see it. He and his partners stepped into the crowd and moved toward the lone rail car sitting at the top of the tracks. Along the way he recognized many faces of Robbery-Homicide detectives. They were men he had worked with years earlier when he had been part of the elite squad. A few of them nodded to him or called him by name. Bosch saw Francis Sheehan, his former partner, standing off by himself smoking a cigarette. Bosch broke from his partners and stepped over.

  ‘Frankie,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Harry, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Got called out. Irving called us out.’

  ‘Shit. Sorry, partner, I wouldn’t wish this one on my enemy.’